Dendrobium infundibulum

Twelve ways of seeing

• measured cast amber
• broad 0.71 : 1
• published 1885
• Plate 74

Not a catalogue entry but a way of looking: how to stand, what to notice, how the line was cut, when it flowers, where it came from, who made it — and then the poems and the classics that taught China to see the same flower. Read the twelve in order and the plate opens.

1. 01

   First Look

   夫象物必在于形似，形似须全其骨气。

   —— 唐·张彦远《历代名画记》

   Likeness is the threshold; bone-and-breath is the point.

   Broad and horizontal: the eye travels side to side. Find where it stops. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find where the green is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch.

2. 02

   Name and Thing

   The binomial is Dendrobium infundibulum: the first word is the genus it belongs among, the second the epithet that sets it apart. The genus name Dendrobium: Dendrobium joins dendron (tree) and bios (life): life upon trees. The Chinese name 高山石斛 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.

3. 03

   Form and Colour

   Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 10.9% of the sheet, foliage 16.7%, the cast amber with a second note of yellow-green. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Orchids carry pseudobulbs or fleshy roots; six tepals, one modified into a lip that serves as a landing stage, and a column uniting stamens and pistil — a structure unique to the family. Filed under green — a moss green, a colour that comes mostly from leaf and stem. Three things fix the habit: leaf arrangement, tepal count, and how the flower is borne.

4. 04

   Composition

   Broad and horizontal — the format for groups or a whole plant with its roots. (about 0.71 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant fills 40% of the sheet, centred above centre — the herbarium way, drawn to be read whole. Cover the margins with your thumb and the plate suffocates; uncover them and the flower breathes again.

5. 05

   Line and Colour

   In the later nineteenth century chromolithography took over: colour printed rather than painted, line demoted. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions.

6. 06

   Season

   Varies by genus: temperate terrestrials flower in spring and summer, tropical epiphytes almost year-round. The year 1885 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The best time to read such a plate is its flowering season: three minutes under the tree explains what no text can.

7. 07

   Provenance

   Worldwide, richest on tropical mountains. Chinese cymbidiums come from the hills of the south; the orchids drawn for European portfolios came largely from the cloud forests of Central America and Southeast Asia. The volume was made in 1885-1906, when most of this knowledge came from living plants under glass.

8. 08

   The Book and the Hand

   “Lindenia: Iconography of the Orchids” was drawn by Jean Jules Linden and published 1885-1906. This plate is Plate 74. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.

9. 09

   Poetic Resonance

   扈江离与辟芷兮，纫秋兰以为佩。

   —— 战国·屈原《离骚》

   I gird on river angelica and secluded angelica; I twist autumn orchids into a chaplet to wear.

   The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the green the corolla becomes its resting point.

10. 10

    The Written Tradition

    芝兰生于深林，不以无人而不芳；君子修道立德，不为穷困而改节。

    —— 《孔子家语·在厄》

    The orchid grows deep in the forest and is fragrant though no one comes; so the gentleman cultivates virtue and does not alter it in hardship.

    Confucius, finding an orchid flowering alone in a valley, is said to have composed the 'Lament for the Orchid'; in the Li Sao, orchids are worn as a girdle of virtue. The difference is not of quality but of question: Europe asks what it is, China asks whom it resembles.

11. 11

    Symbolism

    In China the orchid is the gentleman who blooms unseen; in Victorian Europe it was luxury and obsession, a single new species worth a fortune. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.

12. 12

    What to Take Away

    Carry three rules away: whole before detail; line before colour; picture before book. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1885.